


life, and breath, and all things

by gabolange



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-12
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-12-14 12:02:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11782758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabolange/pseuds/gabolange
Summary: The soul and vital spirit: Shelagh's journey though 1958.





	1. Aberdeenshire, 1933-1945

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to pellucid for a thoughtful beta and the support over the year I've been mulling this story. 
> 
> All errors are my own and any resemblance to any other works, fannish or otherwise, is unintended.

The first time Shelagh Mannion understands what it is to want, she is seven years old and her aunt puts an arm over her shoulders and says, “Well, it’s your house to keep, now.”

She understands, many years later, that this was intended as encouragement—chin up, there, lassie—but she felt and remembers it as dismissive warning about the fate due all girls. That she had the misfortune to become motherless sooner than most was merely to accelerate the inevitable.

In that moment, with Mummy gone—where, her aunt doesn’t say, but it is clear she won’t be coming back—Shelagh longs for the freedom afforded her little brother. At five, Robbie is still young enough to be coddled, but soon will be boy enough to be passed between the men of their little town, heir to their father’s trade and due a neighbor’s daughter. 

She wants, fiercely. Wants Mummy back, fussing over the stove and telling faerie stories in the dark that make Robbie sniffle but Shelagh’s imagination spin. Wants to hear her favorite lullabies again, psalms sung close to her skin in fading summer light. 

Wants something other than her father swinging her by the waist to sit on the counter of their kitchen the day after the burial, saying, “Auntie Agnes will show you how to fix up bread and supper, little one.” She doesn’t know what she wants, looking around at flour and water and her aunt wrapped up in an old gray apron, but it isn’t this.

** 

Shelagh is ten years old when she looks up the disease that killed her mother: pneumonia. She sounds it out, stumbling over the p and the n next to each other before reading a succinct definition.

The next closest words in the dictionary that don’t pertain to fatal illnesses of the lungs are pneuma, the soul and vital spirit, and Po, a river in Italy.

She closes the book before her headmaster sees fit to scold her for undue curiosity and tries to imagine a river in Italy. She has seen the River Don, knows how it tumbles into the sea just north of Aberdeen, has stared at the River Ury splashing in at Inverurie, not too far from where her father takes his produce to town. 

Are rivers in Italy as blue? Did ancient warriors build castles overlooking their banks, before time? If they didn’t have castles, how did they protect their rivers and churches and towns?

She reaches out for the dictionary again, a heavy, leather-bound thing that is her favorite book these days. The world is right here in front of her, in this book of words. Her father would prefer she not stay after school and read the dictionary, has asked the headmaster to send her home for chores if he catches her.

Shelagh traces the words with her fingers, p and n, so peculiar together. 

Pneuma, from the Greek. The vital spirit, or soul. 

Soul, in the English. The animating and vital principle in human beings—but the vicar says the soul is the part of you that lives on after you die. They put her mother’s body in the ground, but her soul went to Heaven, where she watches over her children when they sleep, keeping the bad things away. She is with God.

It tangles all together, now, life and breath and faith, and Shelagh closes her book with a thump.

**

The first time she tries a cigarette, she coughs until her nose runs. The second time, she takes a smaller breath and lets the taste of it roll across her tongue. She doesn’t know if she likes it, but she can pretend for a moment to be as glamourous as Vivien Leigh, imagine a world where the London high streets aren’t deserted and the neighborhood boys aren’t dying in French fields. 

In July, the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on Aberdeen, sending its children scrambling to the hills. The consensus is that it could have been much worse, in so many places it is much worse. Shelagh stubs the cigarette under her shoe and thinks their school halls wouldn’t be this crowded if it wasn’t very bad, indeed; parents, she has grown to understand, prefer not to leave their children.

Shelagh wonders what her mother would think of this world. She’s learning about the Great War in History class now, though there isn’t one of them who doesn’t know of an uncle or a grandfather or a houseful of boys lost in those same French fields. She remembers her mother’s hopeful face, just barely, a voice that promised a future without worry.

She supposes that those are things that mothers say to calm their children’s nightmares, when the spirits who steal naughty boys and girls from their parents become too real in the night. What are the things that mothers say to girls nicking their fathers’ fags instead of fixing supper? What are the things that mothers say to quiet their children’s fears when the world is again torn apart, with no end in sight?

She doesn’t know. Now, she knows only the smell of cigarette smoke as it winds into her hair and her clothes, and the words they speak at church: _The Lord is my strength and my defense, he has become my salvation._

**

The last time, it is worse. Aberdeen is shattered and the names of the dead roll into the countryside on the lips of the wounded. Easter 1943 is spent in shock as they learn: one hundred twenty five dead, scores wounded, a city battered on a chilly Wednesday night.

After Vigil as they stand together in quiet community, still startled by the events of the week, the rector speaks of the charge to serve. He says, follow Christ’s leadership in humbling yourself before those most in need.

The need Shelagh sees is in the county hospital, where skilled doctors and nurses have been called away to greater service and supplies are diverted to more pressing causes. She has no particular knowledge and no skill, but as the idea grows inside her, so does her confidence in it. 

It will not be so different, she thinks, to scrub hospital floors and carry bedpans than it has been to sweep her father’s house and soothe her brother after idle scrapes. Except that it will be new and different and more, something all her own. Perhaps knowledge and skill, one day, but Shelagh refuses to imagine that far. It will be money she has earned and souls she has ministered, in whatever simple way she can.

Her father shrugs when she tells him she plans to leave school to try her hand at being an orderly. “As long as there’s supper, I suppose I don’t care what you do with your time,” he says. Shelagh knows he doesn’t mean anything by it; her father is a creature of habit, and his habit is hot food and a cigarette at seven. But the thought stings, that her work is nothing if it does not beget his pie.

She volunteers to do whatever is needed, and the matron does not ask her age.

**

The Army sends the boys home from the front to convalesce. They strain at their confinement like children, eager for home, and Shelagh can’t help but smile as she straightens their bedsheets. When they leave, supported by crutches and fathers’ strong arms, they wink at her, the pretty girl who has kept them tidy and laughed at their jokes. 

But for some the convalescence is an institutional fiction; they will not leave the hospital they have traveled so far to reach. Is it a relief for their mothers to watch their sons die slowly, cossetted by cotton wool and starch? Or is there kindness in the telegram, impersonal and routine? Shelagh watches the boys and their parents and cannot decide.

There is one who gets no visitors. He is from here, the notes by his bed indicate. _James McConnell, 1920, Oldmeldrum_. The intake notes indicate that the burns and smoke inhalation he suffered—where?—will surely be fatal. Observation and palliative treatments only, the doctor had scrawled.

Shelagh thinks, not for the first time, that to slowly suffocate must be the worst way to die. 

She wants to ask the patient: where are your Mum and Da? At least Shelagh has a father, however gruff, who would visit her in hospital if she were ill or worse. She wants to ask: what happened to you? She isn’t sure she wants to know, but this is the world they live in and she must live with, and not knowing seems even worse.

When the ward is quiet and Shelagh’s work is done, she pulls a chair up to the side of his bed. His breath rattles in his chest; he will die soon. 

But now as she sits beside him, his eyes slide over toward her. “Nurse,” he mumbles. She thinks to correct him, but what good would it bring? 

“Hello,” she says softly. She has nothing to offer other than the comfort of someone nearby as his body fails. She hopes for him that he has something of her faith, a sense that beyond this suffering there is something greater, because without it, this—this will be a terrible, meaningless death.

She reaches out and grasps his hand. It is not enough.

**

Germany surrenders and three weeks later, Shelagh’s father dies. 

She doesn’t expect it, the way the grief settles in her stomach and takes her breath away. She gasps for air as the doctor explains, too simply, that her father’s heart wasn’t strong enough to beat another day. Shelagh wants to press for details, as if there were any to be had; she wants to rail against the unfairness of her only parent gone, as if her anger could reveal God’s plan.

Her father was supposed to fuss about his supper and his cigarettes for another twenty years, Shelagh thinks. He was supposed to see his boy off to a trade and a wife and a houseful of healthy children. He was supposed to spend a moment each night kissing his girl’s forehead in quiet affection rarely acknowledged. 

But that is not to be, and she chastises herself for even thinking the word should.

They take her father’s body and put it in the warming ground and Shelagh is left with a house to sell and a brother to see off and a life that is suddenly hers to guide. In this moment of desperate loss, there is nothing she cannot do.

Her aunt says, “Now you can stop all that medical nonsense and find yourself a young man.” 

Shelagh cannot think of anything she wants less. Instead, the word _calling_ curls inside her like her faith, held close and shared only with the shadows. There is grace in healing, even in the repetition of sterilizing instruments and rolling bandages, for even those jobs well done ease the suffering of others. 

But there is so much more she could give, with proper training and time, and suddenly she has nothing but time.

Shelagh writes away for a place in a London nursing school. 

***


	2. London, 1946-1957

The other girls are loud. They laugh over the noon meal as they trade stories about patients and the matron, so specific in her demands of her charges. Shelagh tries to join in sometimes, wanting to find the humor in their work, but instead finds herself struggling not to chastise. Don’t they know that the minutiae of learning will make them better nurses? Don’t they see the suffering behind their patients’ difficulties?

They are raucous in the morning, giggling over mascara, and in the evening, sharing stories about the boys they are courting or chasing. Shelagh listens in, imagining their lives, burgeoning now with dreams of real stockings and boyfriends who come home at the end of the day from normal jobs. Maisie Thompson’s fellow has work at the _Telegraph_ , Bernice James’s young man is going to make a full recovery from his shrapnel wounds and has been promised a place with the Royal Mail. 

They have so much humor, so much hope for the lives they will lead after their years nursing. Those gentlemen, back from the front, will earn their wages and provide for their future wives, who will turn away from this vocation—and they want that, so badly, so loudly.

She wants to ask them, _Then why are you here?_ But she tucks her chin against the impulse, letting them think her shy instead of critical, and excuses herself to the little chapel at the back of their dormitory.

It has a battered upright piano barely in tune. One of the sisters from a neighboring convent coaxes accompaniment from it for evensong every Wednesday night. 

“You have a beautiful voice,” the sister says one evening. “And you never miss a service.” The sister pauses, and Shelagh listens to her breathe, even and certain. “If you like, Christ Church on Brixton Road holds nightly prayer. You might join the community there.” 

Shelagh runs her hands over the piano keys after the nun departs, the tune idle and wandering. She has spent too many afternoons patching London’s open wounds, too numerous to count, and she wonders anew at the wakening city’s need, the way it obscures everything, demands her full attention.

She thinks: if keeping this city’s people whole is to be her life, let it be her whole life. If purpose and grace delight her, let them delight her forever.

The next night, Shelagh slips into the church after prayers have started and lets the music wash over her.

**

A baby is born the usual way. A boy, pink and squalling, tiny fists flailing in the cool air. Sister Bernadette wraps him gently and leans to place him in his mother’s arms.

She turns her head, refusing to look at the child, folds her arms over her chest, refusing to hold him. 

Sister Bernadette tries to insist, but there is too much to do. She lays the baby in a drawer and attends to his mother. The placenta is delivered whole, the perineum requires no stitching. It is as easy as these things ever are, and soon Sister Bernadette is able to try again. The baby nuzzles into her chest, rooting, as his mother again dismisses him.

“I don’t want him, Sister,” she says. 

It is not hard to see why; the girl in front of her is young, seventeen at most. The father didn’t offer to marry her, her mother put her out. She couldn’t afford to go to a home, couldn’t afford oil for the lamp that dies beside the threadbare bed. The orphanage will surely offer more than this—or so it is easy to believe with one of the sisters of Nonnatus House at her bedside, kind and gentle.

Perhaps the girl is right, but even as she settles the baby back in the drawer and makes for the telephone box, something cold twists under Sister Bernadette’s breastbone. It is one of God’s laws. Mothers love their children, want their children, just as children love their mothers. To see it broken so cavalierly—.

The baby weighs six pounds, eight ounces. He is eighteen and a half inches long. He has never had a meal, he does not have a name. Sister Bernadette calls for a senior midwife and requests they contact the Children’s Officer.

She will never have children. But the image presents itself unbidden: a faceless midwife putting a quiet newborn to her breast. A desperate kind of want, like what she felt for her mother when her mother was alive and she was small—.

Sister Bernadette shakes her head and heads back to the flat to wait.

**

She loves the rhythm of day, the structure of the Offices. They rise for Matins and Lauds, they awaken themselves and the convent with music. They whisper the midday offices with their patients or under their breath, a welcome pause between needle jabs and prenatal checkups. Vespers twins Lauds, and they begin to conclude their days the way they began them, a gentle reminder that the world sleeps even on nights they do not.

They are connected through history to countless men and women before them who sang these words in this order at these times. It grounds her, this routine carried through generations to make tangible her love of a God whose timelessness is impossible to comprehend. 

With her final vows, her voice gains strength and she leads the prayer services when she can. Her sisters stand beside her, joined in their communion of faith, and if some days their voices are not as strong she can lift them and guide them with hers. 

On this cold night they turn on the radio and listen to the Third Programme during handicrafts. She listens, for once uninterrupted, to a Mozart opera she cannot translate and should not be able to understand. But she can hear love story and the betrayals and the humor in the music, and she loses herself in them. She catches herself transported as if in prayer.

They are called to Compline. Tonight, she lets it linger, the Gloria Patri that concludes her part, and turns herself toward God.

**

In a month, they lose three women and one infant. Another baby is born blue and it takes all of Sister Bernadette’s skill to keep him with them. The young nurses rail against the unfairness of it, at the nuns and their God, at their failure to prevent these tragedies.

The baby who died took three gasping breaths before wilting in the doctor’s hands. Of the women who died, two had living children, delivered gently into father’s or grandmother’s arms before being ushered out of a room reeking of blood. Sister Bernadette was only present for one, but she has attended death before and will again and it is too easy to imagine the scenes.

Whether it is a tenement flat or a pristine apartment, the death of a mother always begins with hurried calm as the doctor and senior midwife work to stem the bleeding or restart a failed heart. It takes place in the woman’s marital bed, a place her widower will never again be able to sleep, and ends with a terrible mess and an impossible silence.

Everyone pauses, just a breath, a prayer for the lost mother and the child she has left behind. And then, after sisters and coroners have been called and men set up with the strongest liquor in the house, the doctor is sent home and the nuns and nurses work to remove any trace of the final struggle.

While they scrub blood from the floorboards and their own hands, they send up a plaintive plea to a God they trust: why?

In those moments, Sister Bernadette is a girl again, led by the hand on a cool spring morning to listen to the rector proclaim God’s steadfast love as her feet sink into damp grass, staining her church shoes. 

She receives silence as her answer now as she did then. And so she sits with the uneasy truth that faith is both help and hurt in moments like these. A just God is little comfort as mothers and children lie dead and families are torn to pieces; that the resurrection in Christ awaits does not replace loves lost, even as it gives some of them ease. 

One of the nurses dismisses every prayer. “I trust in our work more than His,” she spits. 

Sister Bernadette might explain that trusting their skill and their training is not to dismiss God, but to do His work in ways only they can. Faith is not to passively accept the challenges of the world. It is to toil, whether in prayer or vocation, to bring about whatever good they can. 

**

The doctor’s wife is dying. Sister Julienne and Sister Evangelina trade shifts at her bedside, though there is nothing to do but ease her pain and hold her hands. It will be weeks, days, and their routines shift to accommodate death as they so often do life.

The boy, Timothy, tags at his father’s heels to clinic. Sister Bernadette knows he does not want to be at home, for it does not feel like home. He does not want to be alone, because when he is alone he thinks about his mother, and his mother is going to die.

He sits quietly in a too-large chair, swinging his legs and then wrapping his ankles around the cold metal, over and over. He doesn’t want the pitying glances the patients send his way, he doesn’t want the lolly Nurse Franklin presents with a pretend flourish. He wants to be normal for an afternoon, even though he is old enough to know it is make-believe.

She sits beside him. “Don’t tell Sister Evangelina,” Sister Bernadette says, “but we’ve got some crayons in the kitchen.”

He doesn’t want to be interested. He is nearly ten, that peculiar age when boys start pretending to adulthood by putting away the childish things they love. She wishes it didn’t happen, that joy never receded into teenage churlishness or adult exhaustion. The little spark behind Timothy’s tired eyes is something she cherishes.

He mumbles, “She doesn’t like to have fun.”

Sister Bernadette smiles. “Oh, sometimes,” she says, leaning down to share the confidence. “But only when she doesn’t think anyone can see.” 

His lips quirk up at that, barely. “This can just be our secret,” she says, gently bumping his thin shoulder. “I won’t tell anyone else.”

He follows her to the kitchen, where she spreads their meagre supplies out on the small table. She sets him up with the few crayons whose points haven’t been worn down, paper new from its packet. He pulls out the blue and turns it in his hands. “Do you like to draw, Sister Bernadette?” he asks.

She settles across from him. “I do,” she says. “I used to be pretty good. But I hear you’re better.”

He blushes at that and ducks his head; he is such a little thing, this boy soon to face more heartache than he can imagine. He sketches a family portrait, Mummy, Dad, and Tim, childish figures on a better day. She draws him a rolling hillside, the landscape she used to see from her childhood bedroom, and when she is called to her patients, she leaves it beside him to keep. 

**

The girls are loud. Their laughter careens through the hallways, and Nonnatus House is brighter for it. 

She lingers at their doors, listening to them giggle over their young men, hearing them shush each other lest the nuns punish illicit liquor or music or indulgence. Yet she would never begrudge them their delights; the challenges they face every day demand an outlet. She will not judge their amusements.

She would not know how to partake even if permitted; what she knows of fashion or dancing is fifteen years out of date and so much has changed. And it is not permission that constrains her, or even her vows, because she has never indulged frivolity. She does not want to join them, not really.

But: she stands in front of her mirror and pulls off her cap and takes down her hair and removes her glasses. Who is she, today? She bleeds her father’s practicality, has done since she was too young to understand it, but somehow she has never noticed how much she looks like her mother.

Her mother wore her light hair cropped and tightly crimped, modern then. She danced across their floors in cotton dresses, homemade but cut from patterns of the day’s most timely magazines. She had been beautiful.

Could her daughter be, if she wanted to? Could she put on lipstick and do up her hair and live in the world as more than an unseen member of a disdained collective—“Don’t let the nuns see!” Would she want it?

She cannot name the unease that coils in her stomach, tight and growing ever-present. It feels something like jealousy, but deeper, more pervasive. It isn’t a childhood slight, a girl with a nicer dress or a boy with better marks. Perhaps envy, in the traditional sense, that feeling of disconnected, resentful longing.

But for what, she does not know and hasn’t time to learn. She puts on her glasses and ties up her hair. She replaces her cap, her bandeau, her wimple. There it is, the face she knows. 

Sister Bernadette, who has duties to attend. 

***


	3. London, 1958

It is a small moment. The labor is long and loud and it is very late when they announce the new arrival to his family. There is a cluster of men, ever astonished by this process, the father, his brothers, their boys. One of them produces a flask and glasses and offers a nip to Sister Bernadette and Doctor Turner, which they surely should refuse.

Doctor Turner accepts the drink with a shrug and a sidelong smile, and Sister Bernadette cannot remember the last time she saw him smile. She has seen him pretend to it when Timothy flags his attention at the surgery, but even his boy can see through it. But since his wife died, since they knew she would die, he hasn’t managed it, not really.

When did she start noticing these things? She bears no more witness to his grief than anyone else, has no right to see the loosening thread on the button on his coat, that his jumper is beginning to fray. But it was easy to observe, and then nothing to look closer. 

At the Cubs’ last concert, he couldn’t help but follow the piano’s music with his fingers, the strains of Für Elise in perfect time against his knee. She wonders when he stopped playing, if he sang in church until his voice broke like so many parish boys. 

A quiet girl, pregnant far too young, presented at clinic and burst into tears. His usual brisk manner faded, and Sister Bernadette could see the father he is, or could be if time ever allowed. 

She has no right to these thoughts, does not know why they linger in her mind. But now he smiles and she cannot look away.

**

She would name her goldfish Thomas. She remembers a boy, a year older, not yet grown into his limbs. He smelled musty, like the cows his family owned, and kissed her with his teeth.

The nurses would never ask. Her habit, her routines, the deliberate visibility of her dedication to this calling constrain them and her; when she stopped being Shelagh Mannion and became Sister Bernadette, she renounced the right to reminisce about walking out with a young man for a fortnight when she was young. That history belongs to someone else.

She traces it back, now. Thomas. Kind, but not eloquent; thoughtful, but not well-read. The day he asked to do more than kiss her she had demurred and that had been the end. She went to work and he went to war. She thinks he came home, one day, but doesn’t know because it never mattered. He never mattered enough.

Now, she tries to remember every detail: the callouses on his working hands, his pitiful Latin, the taste of tea on his tongue. Doctor Turner would taste of cigarettes, smell of lye and chip shop oil. His Latin would be workaday, not liturgical; his reading constrained to medical journals by both interest and time. His hands, she thinks, must be worn from too much washing.

These thoughts belong to someone else, to a girl who was allowed to wonder what it would be like to kiss a man because she wanted to, because she liked him. She likes Doctor Turner in a way that might be familiar, if she was still that girl who kissed a boy on the heath. But she isn’t, because she had decided that these things were easily dismissed, irrelevant, for other people. For so long, they had been.

She ponders who she would have been if she had liked Thomas more in that brief moment of knowing him. Perhaps not a nun wondering after the parish doctor, thinking of his hands.

**

She lies in bed and sees it, over and over. 

She placed her hand in Doctor Turner’s, pretending for a moment that it needed medical attention, an obvious lie. He held it softly, not the grip of a physician attending a patient, but of something she cannot name. His closed his eyes and kissed her palm, bending to place his lips beside the oozing cut. 

It was destructive and palliative both, a violation of her vows and a balm to her soul in one movement that she cannot forget. His mouth against her skin had been gentle, reverent. His words apologetic, his eyes haunted. Does he know he haunts her now, that every time she closes her eyes, she sees his face, feels his touch? Does he know how much it hurt her to turn away, to hear the resignation in his voice?

She closes her eyes and imagines his lips on her hand, on her cheek, against her mouth. She imagines more than that, his hands on her waist, on her breast, and hates herself for it. 

_Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one._

God does not answer her prayers, has not for months. He does not stop her stepping in to ease Timothy Turner’s cares, this wonderful motherless boy. He does not quell the weight in her stomach when Doctor Turner smiles, and despite her prayers she is glad for it sometimes. 

Is it God who has failed her, or she who has failed God? 

**

Tuberculosis, from the Latin _Tuberculum_. Small swelling, pimple, lump. The words are as inelegant as the disease they herald, but their meaning is clear. Without treatment, the pustules in her lungs will slowly steal her breath and then her life. Her death would not be as quick as with pneumonia or suffocation; tuberculosis lingers.

It will not kill her, everyone promises. She will regain the strength she has not yet lost. They say the triple treatment is a miracle.

Streptomycin, para aminosalicylic acid, isoniazid, the last of which turned the possibility of a cure into a near guarantee. They discovered it in Edinburgh, which she saw once through a foggy train window, and now word spreads through all of England that an Irish doctor in a Scottish town has found a cure. 

And so she has no reason to disbelieve Doctor Turner or the physicians and nurses that greet her at Saint Anne’s with hope about her prognosis. “We will have you shipshape in no time,” says the woman who will be her primary caretaker. That is a lie—the treatment requires eighteen months of medication, and her confinement could endure the course—but it is intended as a kindness. She has delivered equally false reassurances more often than she can recall, those practiced asides designed to keep a mother calm in labor, the quiet murmurs of hope in the moment before a baby breathes.

It is not hope she needs today. “We shall see,” she repeats, because it is not the illness she fears or the treatment, but the space beyond it; they promise her she will live and they imagine they know what that means. 

She wishes she did.

She has never been so terrified.

**

Nurse Franklin says, “We’d like you to come home,” and “It will be just like old times again.” Sister Bernadette wonders at this nostalgia for something the nurse has not always loved, but understands that her visitor is unsettled by their setting. She wants her sometimes teacher, sometimes friend returned to her rightful place to restore the order of things.

There is no reason for Nurse Franklin or anyone else to question that order. Of course Sister Bernadette will return to Nonnatus House.

But her temptations live in Poplar and loiter in her home on long, difficult nights. She does not know if she has the strength to return as she is, committed to this life that demands so many things she once found easy. Somewhere else, perhaps, it would not be so hard.

Before she leaves, Nurse Franklin says, “Oh, Doctor Turner says hello,” a forgotten aside that makes Sister Bernadette’s heart clench. She has not opened his letters, cannot. She thinks she knows what they might say and she cannot face it.

Somewhere else, far from here, far from him—the idea lingers. America, Australia, Aberdeen. Babies are birthed there as in London, God’s love and God’s work are not confined to England. If she leaves, she can stay on the path she has chosen for herself, recommit herself to her work, forget the way her breath catches when she sees the doctor out of the corner of her eye. She can take with her the good she has learned at Nonnatus House and leave behind her suffering.

A different place, a better place. It would be easy enough, a change of direction but not of course. Is that what God wants for her? She thinks He must. She will try to want it with Him.

_Show me the way I should go, for to you I entrust my life. Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you._

**

Sister Bernadette is thirty two years old, far too old to want this fiercely. She would like to blame the illness that leaves her breathless, the medication that leaves her nauseous, but these she can only credit with a deep exhaustion that forces honesty she has long avoided.

There is nothing she needs, here in this safest of places, but oh, she wants.

It feels no different than when she was a child, that physical urge that made her kick her feet against her aunt, her father, as if the movement could resolve the desperate ache for something that could never be. She tosses and turns, but it does not help, as it did not then. It is worse, now, because now she is grown, because she brought this disconsolation upon herself.

Another woman could fall in love. She shuts her eyes against the words because she does not want to think them. Thinking them makes them real, and they cannot be real.

Another woman might marry the man she loves and who loves her, might give in to his touch, might go to his bed. For that woman, these things would be expected, celebrated. For that woman, they would not represent a renunciation of a community, of a life freely chosen.

Another woman might carry and birth a child and live long enough to see him educated, or married, or happy. For a while, she might sing songs from the old country, lilting and soothing, so that child could sleep despite the shadows that creep into the corner of his room, terrifying visions put to rest by mother’s familiar voice.

But what of her? She lived without want for years, a decade, but now she wakes suddenly in a fog of medication and fear with the impossible need to have everything she gave up, once, when she was young and facile and could not imagine wanting anything at all.

**

She is well enough to walk the garden now, but the path forms a loping figure-eight, slowly winding back in on itself, turning her toward the sanatorium before she can glimpse anything beyond its grounds. She is improving, but she is still here, and here she has nothing but time to think. 

Once, she found grace in work, but now the illness and this place insist that she seek it in contemplation.

She vowed to love God, to serve Him and His neediest children, abandoning the distractions of the world. But, she thinks, the world needn’t distract from service. The things she swore to forsake—the pretty dresses the nurses wear, their drive to argue for what is right long after a decision has been made, their laughter about the men they might love—no more impede serving community or God than the phases of the moon.

She promised to live for God’s blessings, but the holiest moments in their lives are those quotidian, important things she bound herself only to observe: the marriage, the baptism, the child’s confirmation. If she casts off her vows, she might—she hopes to—receive a sacrament never considered, long denied.

It need not be an exclusive choice, to live in God’s service and to love a man. It would not degrade her faith if she expands her vision of what her life can be, if she chooses both instead of one. 

It would be different. It will be different. She hardly knows what to imagine for this life she hopes to lead. She can only pray, rededicated, that she will feel God’s guidance as she follows this new path—and that she will trust herself enough to heed it. 

**

Poplar misses her, Doctor Turner writes. He writes: the mothers, the nurses, everyone looks for her at clinic, listens for her voice keeping them all in order. 

Timothy misses her, Doctor Turner writes. He does not write that Timothy struggles without a mother who might be able to pay him more attention than his distracted, overworked father. He does not write that he does his best for the boy, for his wife’s memory, but that it is not enough.

He misses her, though he doesn’t say so at all, hesitant to declare the reason for his letters. But it is there in Mrs. Harrison’s difficult labor, assisted capably enough by Nurse Lee, who is not yet a steady hand. It is there in his detailed description of new ultrasonic technology, dismissed as utter nonsense by Sister Evangelina. It is there in the volume of paper she holds in her lap, the ink staining her fingers.

He wants to know: Why did she choose her vocation? He discovered his as a boy, watching the way his gruff local physician gentled in the face of real illness. Why did she choose Poplar? He wants to be where the need is greatest, and Poplar needs so much. Does she have family? His parents are dead, now, his only sister lives in Leeds. But mostly, it is just him and Timothy, and that is harder than he would prefer to admit. 

He is sorry. For presuming to kiss her, for presuming she will read his letters at all. He has taken liberties, which is unlike him, and yet he cannot stop writing. He does not believe in God, and so he hopes she will forgive him. He hopes there is nothing to forgive.

And the thing he cannot write, but which bleeds through every word on every page: he loves her. He would like the chance to love her.

**

She says, “I was living the wrong life.”

She says, “I’m coming home to Poplar.”

Shelagh picks up her suitcases, light in her hands, and steps out into the fog. 

****


End file.
